From our file named "Duh." The Alabama Department of Human Resources says 13 counties that reinitiated a work requirement for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the food stamp program, saw an 85% drop in recipients. The counties had been exempt from the work requirement due to high levels of unemployment. But with the economy recovering, the state of Alabama restarted the work requirement on January 1 this year, which resulted in the massive drop in SNAP participants. ... Nationwide, there are about 44 million people receiving SNAP benefits at a cost of about $71 billion. The...

The Trump administration wants to impose a work requirement on able-bodied adults who receive food stamps and force states to pick up some of the costs as part of a wider plan to slash spending by $3.6 trillion over the next decade. Budget director Mick Mulvaney said that once states have “a little skin in the game,” they will be more inclined to root out abuses and waste in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Enrollments haven’t decreased much since the recession despite a low 4.5 percent unemployment rate. The program cost about $33 billion in 2007 with 26 million...

With the publication of the State Department inspector general's extraordinarily damning report on Hillary Clinton's private email server, we're going to find out if Bernie Sanders really wants to be president or if his campaign has merely been an academic exercise in socialism promotion. Donald Trump will certainly be able to use the report to wound Clinton and has already started, but Sanders is now in a position to use it to actually take her down. Right now, before the California primary. But will he? So far Bernie has been reluctant to speak about the emails - except once to...

States are moving to once again require able-bodied adults to put in work hours in exchange for food stamps, after the requirements largely were suspended by the Obama administration. The slow-moving reversal follows the administration pulling back on Clinton-era changes that required recipients to work for government welfare benefits. Signing the reform bill in 1996 alongside then-Speaker Newt Gingrich, then-President Bill Clinton said the goal was to make welfare “a second chance, not a way of life.” But during the last recession, President Obama allowed states to suspend a requirement that able-bodied adults without children work at least 20 hours...

LANSING (WWJ) - Could this mean the end of welfare as we know it? A bill has passed in the Michigan Senate that would require those receiving public assistance to do some “volunteer” work. Another bill, which passed the House Commerce Committee, requires drug testing, revoking benefits for welfare recipients who refuse the test or who test positive. “What [the legislation] does, it says, in order for your to receive your cash assistance, your welfare check, you must provide some kind of community service to the community,” said the volunteer work bill’s sponsor, State Senator Joe Hune, who represents Livingston...

The Obama administration’s efforts at extending executive authority were dealt a setback on Tuesday. The bipartisan Government Accountability Office flagged the administration’s end run around Congress in its July memo announcing changes to the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) act, aka “welfare reform.” The GAO said that the White House needs to give Congress the chance to block its plan that permits states to tweak the work requirements that needy families must satisfy in order to receive government assistance under the program. The official word came in the form of a letter to lawmakers from GAO’s general counsel, Lynn...

Mitt Romney, hoping to draw a sharp contrast on welfare, is citing a disputed charge that President Barack Obama is giving recipients a free ride, and he can point to his own record of pushing for tighter rules. Romney, Massachusetts governor from 2003 to 2007, fought to require single parents with children as young as a year old to work to get welfare benefits if they could obtain state-subsidized child care. He opposed efforts to allow time spent in job training or education programs to count toward the state's 20-hour weekly work requirement for welfare recipients, and pushed for a...

Yesterday was actually the 16th anniversary of a historic piece of legislation coming-into-law: it was called the 'Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act', a trailblazing welfare reform bill passed in 1996 by the first GOP Congress in 40 years) that was considered a major cornerstone of House Speaker Gingrich's legendary Contract with America. What it did -among other things- was to add a work requirement which resulted in a significant jump in employment among many of those who -prior to reform- seemed permanently glued to the government teat (and their sofa). The long-term effect was even more dramatic: both welfare and poverty rates declined significantly during...

President Obama has created a firestorm by overturning the work requirements of the popular 1996 welfare-reform law. Now his White House is bristling because Mitt Romney dares to point out that fact on the stump and in a new campaign ad. Obama’s move is only the latest step in a long history of liberal opposition to work requirements. The Left blocked welfare-reform efforts under both Presidents Nixon and Reagan, for example. In 1996, a Republican Congress drafted a welfare-reform law — Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) — that for the first time established meaningful work standards for welfare recipients....

AT a time of unprecedented budget crises, it is unthinkable that we should roll back welfare reform -- yet that's what's happening. In New York and other states, and on the federal level, lawmakers are broadening eligibility, eliminating work requirements and raising cash pay-outs. The drive is to substitute all sorts of social and educational services for work requirements -- despite overwhelming evidence that such assistance doesn't lead to employment. As a nation, we'll come to regret these decisions, because welfare reform has worked -- and worked well. It must be preserved.

The Charlotte Housing Authority is considering giving thousands of public housing residents a choice: Get a job or get out. Agency leaders are proposing a plan that would force tenants to find work to keep their government housing benefits. The idea has prompted criticism from some advocates for the poor who say it would be wrong to impose the rule during the country's worst economic crisis in decades. But backers say it's only right to make able-bodied adults work and try to gain self sufficiency. â€śThere's never a perfect time to start a change,â€ť said Jennifer Gallman, a spokeswoman for...

Barack Obama's national plan for voluntary community service clearly illustrates his audacious goal to become the Nation's Community Organizer. "Barack Obama's Plan For Universal Voluntary Citizen Service" is subtitled "Helping All Americans Serve Their Country." "Universal" and "All" are only slight exaggerations. As president, he'd offer voluntary service programs for everyone except pre-schoolers through 5th grade. A substantial cafeteria of federal programs already serves this cuisine. But Obama plans to lengthen the serving line, considerably. Grab a tray and we'll sample some of his new dishes, plus some old plates he plans to enhance. Peace Corps A favorite since 1961....

Last week, the board got some answers. In 2006, 739 of Hennepin County's 11,000 MFIP recipients worked for no pay as a condition of continuing to receive welfare benefits. They worked an average of four to six weeks apiece at a long list of local nonprofits. Hennepin County contracts with an outside agency to provide the placements. (Under a separate program, the county spent $600,000 subsidizing the wages of another 200 MFIP recipients who were having trouble finding jobs.) Thirty-two of the people performing unpaid work were eventually hired by the agencies where they were working. Results for the rest...

Ten years ago next month, a bipartisan majority in Congress and a Democratic president launched America's welfare policy in a new and largely uncharted direction. It would be difficult to exaggerate the predictions of doom hurled against the Republican welfare reform bill signed by President Clinton on Aug. 22, 1996. Mr. Clinton had previously vetoed two versions of welfare reform when, with skill, daring and persistence, Republicans in the House and Senate pushed it through Congress a third time and put it again on the president's desk. In an act of remarkable political courage, Mr. Clinton defied senior members of...

<p>Children whose parents entered an experimental welfare-to-work program in Milwaukee during the 1990s improved socially and academically, say authors of a study being released today.</p>
<p>These findings support the wisdom of expanding work supports for poor families, especially in child care, health care and the earned-income tax credit, said Aletha Huston, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin and director of the Manpower Demonstration Research Corp. (MDRC) study.</p>